 This video is brought to you by Nebula. If you head over to the link in the description, you can check out an exclusive episode of Cover Stories, where I talk about the cover of Rage Against the Machine's self-titled debut album. In 1968, a British musical institution was starting to disintegrate. The Yardbirds had been giants in the British blues revival scene since 1963, famously starting the careers of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. But by the end of the decade, creative differences were starting to emerge. Page wanted to take the band's music into heavier, louder territory inspired by the psychedelic scene that was exploding around them. But the rest of the band wasn't as keen, wanting to move more in a lighter, folky direction. So Page left the group and set off to create his own new supergroup. Originally, he hoped to plunder the rhythm section from The Who, but when he brought the idea to Keith Moon and John Antwistle, they weren't so hot on it. As the story goes, one of Moon or Antwistle told Page that they thought the idea would go over like a lead balloon. You can probably guess where this story goes next. Jimmy Page found his band elsewhere and took that turn of phrase for his name. The band dropped the A from lead so that people wouldn't pronounce it lead, and replaced balloon with the sleeker Zeppelin. And just like that, a legend was born. Within months, Led Zeppelin had gone to the studio and cut their first album. When that album dropped, it was wrapped in an iconic piece of album artwork. That artwork is a clear play on the band's name, but it's more than that too. It's a provocative visual metaphor and a perfect representation of the explosive sound that would shake the music world to its core. Welcome to cover stories. On May 3rd, 1937, the LZ129 Hindenburg set off from Frankfurt on a three-day transatlantic voyage to the United States. The Hindenburg was the largest aircraft ever to fly, a luxury airship that promised a future of incredible air travel when the concept of transatlantic flights were still novel. This flight was going to be the first of ten round trips that the Hindenburg was to make that year, but when the airship came into dock in Lakehurst, New Jersey, disaster struck. As the ship approached the moor, it burst into a violent eruption of flames and came crashing to the ground, killing 35 of the 97 people on board. To this day, nobody knows the cause of the fire. The Hindenburg disaster wasn't the first airship crash of its kind, but it was the best documented. Crowds of people and journalists had gathered to watch the airship's approach, so there were plenty of cameras rolling to capture the visceral carnage of the airship explosion. One of those cameras belonged to photojournalist Sam Scheer. When the Zeppelin wind up in flames, Scheer was quick on the draw, shooting straight from the hip rather than wasting precious seconds bringing the camera up to his eye. The result was a stunning image that captured the ship mid-explosion, thrown into dramatic contrast by the light of flame. It was Scheer's image that would come to be immortalized in the annals of rock history a generation later. Jimmy Page himself chose the photograph, working with graphic designer George Hardy, who modified the image to bring out that contrast, turning it into a stark piece of noise filled black and white. He put the band's name and the Atlantic Records logo in orange, helping to conjure images of fire and flame. The final result is a simple but striking image, and one that's a perfect representation of everything that's to come in the album. The violence and destruction serves as a visual metaphor for the roaring sound that would come to define Zeppelin. John Bonham's thunderous drums and Jimmy Page's manic guitar can sound like catastrophe when they're blaring out of a stereo system at full volume. The album cover also manages to capture another side of Led Zeppelin though. With Hardy's treatment, the Hindenburg image becomes more abstract, a black and white phallus stretching out across the album, implying a deep sort of raunchy sexuality that's at the core of Robert Plant's entire persona. The use of Sheer's image is a complete subversion, taking a striking moment of tragedy and turning it into a raw celebration of noise and passion. A perfect fit for an explosive debut album. Led Zeppelin 1 helped Zeppelin along the way to rock superstardom, but their incendiary cover ended up getting them in a bit of trouble. In February 1970, Zeppelin were due to play a show in Copenhagen when they found themselves threatened with legal action from a wealthy aristocrat. That woman was named Eva von Zeppelin. She was a descendant of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the man who invented airships and was the reason for their name. Eva von Zeppelin wasn't a fan of Led Zeppelin, calling them shrieking monkeys. She thought their band name was Slander to her family name, and that Slander was worsened by the fact that they had used the Hindenburg tragedy that spelled the end of the airship era as their album artwork. In the end, Zeppelin avoided this trouble by briefly renaming themselves the knobs for a gig. While it might have pissed off one aristocrat, the cover art for Led Zeppelin 1 was a roaring success. Hindenburg imagery quickly found its way onto merch, and a generation later the airship crash is indelibly tied to Led Zeppelin in the minds of many. Not bad for a band that was predicted to flame out and crash before they ever took flight. Led Zeppelin 1 wasn't the only time that a famous historical image graced the cover of an iconic debut album. In fact, it's not even the only time a famous historical image of a fire graced the cover of an iconic debut album. In 1991, Rage Against the Machine featured a famous photo of Buddhist monk Tutuan Duk setting himself on fire in protest. If you want to learn about that cover, I have a whole episode of cover stories on that exclusively on Nebula right now. I wanted to release that video to YouTube, but the realities of YouTube make it really hard to talk about subjects like war and protest without getting demonetized and buried in the algorithm. That's part of the reason why we made Nebula, so that we could create an experiment free from the restrictions of YouTube. But honestly, Nebula has grown to be so much more than that. It's a platform that's funding the creation of really incredible originals, including my own original Polyphonic Magazine, where I've been able to have intimate interviews with smaller artists. If you sign up to Nebula with the link in the description, you'll get 40% off an annual plan, and you'll also get access to Nebula classes, where creators will teach you how to create. Classes is a great resource for people who want to be creators, or just for people who want a peek behind the curtain. I've even got my own class up there if you want to check that out. Really, I gush about Nebula because it's a platform that I believe in, and a platform that has made my life way better as a creator. It's let me do things that I never would have been able to do on YouTube, and it's also given me a ton of great content to watch. So if you want to check it out, head on over to the link in the description. Following that link gets you a great deal on Nebula, and it also does a whole lot to support my channel. And hey, thanks for watching!